If you want to be a successful brand, then choosing a Digital Marketing approach for your business has become a necessity. Whether you are an entrepreneur, startup or even a small business, a digital marketing campaign plan is essential to achieve success in the digital world. And to create that plan, marketers use various tools both free and premium that offers unique data on consumer behavior. Whereas there are some other tools that can effectively promote your content through different marketing channels. Below are some of the essential tools which you should definitely use to carry out an effective digital marketing campaign.
Google Keyword Planner
Keyword research is the most intricate part 
when devising a marketing plan for your brand. Keywords can also be seen as the pillars of digital marketing campaign strategy as improper keyword research can lead to unrelated traffic. And this will increase the bounce rate and lower your website reputation in Google search.
Every professional uses some kind of tool in order to find the best possible keywords. However Google Keyword Planner Tool remains the core of keyword research for every professional in the digital world.
Semrush
SEMrush is a tool developed by SEOQuake 
which you can use to analyze your competition before starting out your digital marketing campaign. It is an essential tool to analyze how your website is performing. Or how well your competitor is performing in terms of keyword ranking in Google search engine.
With this tool, you can also see various important metrics such as organic and paid search data. In fact, the data that is not even available in Google Keyword Planner.
Google Trends
If you want to find out the latest trends 
emerging in the marketing segment or how a keyword has perform over time in the past, Google Trends is the tool to use. Doing keyword research takes a lot of time but if you can get an insight on how the keywords will perform over time, this small piece of data can a make a huge difference in your keyword research process. Google Trends offers a simple interface which is easy to use and can provide you valuable insights in your keyword research.
If you are researching competitors, starting a new marketing campaign or just looking for new trends to create an article for your blog, then Google Trends is one of the best tool for trend research in 2017.
Copyspace
If you are not new to Search Engine 
Optimization then you must be aware of how content has become the integral part of SEO in 2017. Duplicate content can cause major harm to your website. So if you hired a freelancer for writing articles for your website, make sure to check the uniqueness of the article by running the content through plagiarism checker tool.
One such tool to check uniqueness of the content which is also free to use is Copyscape. Copyscape offers two versions, a free tool and a paid tool. In the free section, Copyscape cross checks your article content posted on your website with possible copied versions on other websites. It can also be used as a tool to check if someone has copied your content without your permission. The premium version offers much advanced features such as cross checking of content instead of checking content posted at a url.
Google Analytics
A marketing campaign is incomplete without 
analytics and stats. After you have implemented your digital marketing campaign few key statistics which you must have for analysis are:
How many of visitors on your website are new and how many are returning visitors?
Which pages on your website has a high bounce rate and why?
Where are your visitors coming from, the source?
What are the pages your visitors are most interested in?
Google Analytics is one such tool which provides in depth statistics about the behavior of your website visitors. With the use of analytics tool you can get smarter insights on which search terms people are using to visit your website through Google search or other search engines. This can help you to optimize your marketing strategy and target the popular keywords instead of mediocre performing keywords.
MailChimp
There are many different marketing 
channels which you can use to carry out your message to the consumers such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Youtube. However, these platforms are very limited and offers many constraints when you want a more strategic marketing approach. Here is when email marketing comes into play.
Email marketing offers unique one to one interaction between the consumer and a brand. Even with the rise of social media marketing and other marketing platforms, Email marketing still remains an effective marketing tool. The reason is its easy management and full control over the content that reaches the consumers.
Mailchimp is one of the most preferred email marketing tool available online. Largely due to the most generous plans it offers without having to pay anything. Under the free plan, you can have upto 2,000 email subscribers and send upto 12,000 emails per month. It also comes with a range of different email templates, which you can use even when opting for the free plan. The free plan also includes access to analytics data as standard but doesn’t come with some advanced features like spam filter or autoresponder.
Canva
To build a professional appearance and gain 
credibility, having well researched content on your website is a must have marketing feature in 2017. However without visual graphics content is incomplete. Visual content has become an increasingly favorite product for both marketers and customers alike.
Canva is one such tool which has gained popularity among digital marketers from various domains. That’s because, there is no such free visual design tools available in the market that have unrivalled features like Canva. Only Canva can offer an easy to use and most intuitive drag and drop interface. You can use Canva to create social media images, brochures, business proposals and custom designs (that can’t be categorized).
So, if you want to increase engagement on your website or social media channels then use visuals carefully placed along with content. This is a sure shot way to stay on top of Digital Marketing campaign in 2017.
Buzzsumo
If you have just run out of topics
and looking for fresh content generation ideas, then you should give Buzzsumo a try. Buzzsumo helps you to get in depth details of content based on the keyword you want to use.
Just put a keyword in the search bar at Buzzsumo to see the most shared content on social media platforms. It also helps you to uncover various ideas related to your topic. Based on the popularity and social shares, it provides an insight into the best performing articles on social media.
Ahrefs
Backlinks are at the heart of SEO. You won’t 
find a single website online which is ranking for some pretty major keywords without high quality backlinks. The more quality backlinks your website has, the better will be the visibility in Google search.
In order to research a competitor an effective backlink checking tool has to be used. Ahrefs is one such tool which although paid is one of the most powerful backlink checking tool available online. It offers you the opportunity to find the best backlinks your competitor has. And also a chance to grab those backlinks for your own website.
When you put a competitor website into the search field, ahrefs analyzes the domain and break downs all the data with various categories. These categories includes, anchor text of the backlinks, the total number of referring domains from different IP addresses and much more.
Hootsuite
It is not easy to handle all the social media 
channels when you are managing multiple projects. To share a single post you’ll have to login to each platform separately and add the post one by one. To make the job easier you need a social media management system. So that you can post to all the social media channels or even schedule it from the same dashboard.
For this purpose, Hootsuite works the best. It allows users to post content on various social media channels without having to login into each platform. Hootsuite also helps in scheduling the content that you want to post at a specific time. This way you can have maximum engagement on your social media posts.
Instead of doing repetitive tasks, use digital marketing campaign tools to save money as well as your valuable time. However this is also true that these tools offers just automation of simple but time consuming tasks. Hence, they are as just a tool for marketing. They should not be mistaken for some sort of secret magic formula which you can just use to get ahead of the competitor in just an instant.
If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, try using all these tools and create a detailed and effective marketing plan. This will give you a leap ahead in the fast paced world of digital marketing campaign.
Let me know if you think I missed something you believe should be included in list?